By Keri O’Shea
The rape/revenge motif has been a staple in exploitation cinema for decades, and judging by the indie output of the last ten years or so, it’s not going anywhere anytime soon, either. I Spit On Your Grave has been blue-filtered and re-calibrated – more than once – for a younger generation, the presence of the woman-tied-to-chair is as recognisable a trope as any these days and a few years back, the UK’s biggest-budget horror movie festival was even being dubbed ‘RapeFest’ on social media by audiences nonplussed with the sheer number of films containing that plot line. I’m not here to wonder aloud why this is still such a storyline of choice – though the fact that the whole boys-maim-girl motif is so ubiquitous as to have become predictable does raise an eyebrow, and as there seems to be little danger of a let-up, it equally seems that the films themselves now have to raise the bar to get their own boys maiming girls noticed. Either the films get nastier and nastier, then, or – as with Avenged, which was formerly released under the title Savaged – the films must add something altogether different into the mix. Accordingly, Avenged has made the interesting, if oddball decision to mix a few genres together, namely by merging rape/revenge with a supernatural storyline. The ambitiousness of this deserves merit, although the film itself is not without several issues as a result.
Zoe (Amanda Adrienne, who here has more than a passing resemblance to a young Marilyn Burns) has recently lost her dad and decided to take her inheritance – his ‘pride and joy’ car – on a road trip to New Mexico, having failed to heed a warning that there are lots of nutters on the open road. (Zoe is also Deaf, though this makes little difference to anything that happens, save in one later scene.) After stopping to send a few selfies to her boyfriend Dane (Marc Anthony Samuel) she quickly learns the perils of texting whilst at the wheel, when she narrowly avoids hitting a man stood in the road and witnesses a gang of cookie-cutter rednecks mowing another man down. (And here’s the first reference to a race element in the plot: the rednecks are ‘hunting savages’, or native Americans as I gather they generally prefer.) Zoe tries to help the survivor, which is her second big mistake after the constant text-messaging; for her troubles, she’s abducted, tied to a bed, and then just what you’d expect to happen happens. So far, so harrowing.
She’s soon taken out and left for dead, but here’s where the film changes tack and doesn’t opt for the more usual angle of a young woman overcoming all odds by herself; rather than sticking with the realistic style which nonetheless usually means the lead female somehow survives everything as if by magic, Avenged invokes supernaturalism, but keeps it – by and large – looking gritty and realistic. Zoe is found by one of the locals, an Apache man who tries to revive her with his traditional medicine. It works, but at a price; she’s brought back but alongside the spirit of a vengeful Apache chieftain, who was killed by the ancestor of the same rednecks who tried to dispatch Zoe. This means she’s on borrowed time, but now comes imbued with his abilities…which, however you feel about this about-face, you have to admit is a different way of moving the plot forward. This will also be why I’ve seen the film compared to The Crow, but really speaking, it’s a poor comparison which doesn’t say much about Avenged except to allude to a supernatural/vengeance idea which couldn’t be handled more differently or less bloodily in the better-known title. What we have in Avenged is a badly-wounded (read: dead) rape victim who is resurrected as an undead agent of revenge, both hers and someone else’s: she has to work against time not because she only has a night, but because she’s literally falling apart. Hardly a gothic romance tale, there.
Before I come to my criticisms of this film and the way it unfolds, let me say that there is much to congratulate director Michael Ojeda for here. Firstly, although the film looks as though it was made for the Instagram generation (selfies and mobile phone pictures figure in the plot early on; coloured filters are abundant) it still looks very good actually, with crisp, bright colours, a sense of direction and scale to match the claustrophobia of later shots and throughout, a really good eye with nicely-composed shots. Additionally the soundtrack used, both the incidental music and the songs, are well-balanced and suitable, fitting very well, and the special effects – accomplished with good ol’ fashioned prosthetics and sparing CGI – are excellent. As for the performances, the actors involved do very well with their roles as well as in the case of Amanda Adrienne, getting really put through the wringer, and although one of my main issues with the film is with the yeehaw gang (see below) they, too, do their best with what they’re given. As a first horror feature from a guy who has so far built his career on sensationalist TV movies and the ‘Deadliest Warrior’ series, it’s an impressive gear shift we’re seeing. The first thing which really hobbles the film, though, is the redneck family I mentioned earlier. They really are repellent – and not in and of themselves, as their behaviour is clearly only intended to be read one way, but they’re just not well-written. Every redneck stereotype is blown up to grotesque proportions, but still held at enough of a distance to make the brothers feel cartoonish. In them, the expected racist, sexist, ill-educated dialogue just falls short; it’s not their acting, it’s the script, and I’d rather have had to dig a little deeper to see them as repulsive than by having them yelling about ‘nigger lovers’ or loudly taking pride in a family history of hunting Native Americans. I’m not saying people (broadly) like this don’t exist. I am saying that a massive over-reliance on this type of villain in horror can be very, very detrimental.
As for the genre-splicing, well, as I suggested, it does at least show that the filmmakers are daring to do something different. I had no idea how, if at all the ‘Crow’ elements I’d heard were going to happen, and so it had the benefit of catching me by surprise, upping the gore and changing the pace of the film from the more usual torture/vengeance yarn. The thing is, having sat through a fairly gruelling, bloody and violent abduction and sexual assault scene (although this isn’t given lots of screen time, it’s still as unpleasant as you’d think), the sudden introduction of elements which saw the film turning into something like an action flick/revenge porn/supernatural horror didn’t rest all that comfortably with me. Tonally, I felt confused. Add to that the fact that we are first asked to stomach a Native American plot line about murder and spectral revenge and then the film segues into camp lines like ‘My baby’s got an axe to grind!” and random footage of injuns appearing on a TV screen, and I couldn’t help but feel that the first half of the film was being sent up by the second – but why? Avenged starts out incredibly heavy, then changes around so much that it’s hard to take. Ambition is one thing, but a lot of its commendable ideas are flawed in execution. (I can see, by the by, why they’d drop the previous title ‘Savaged’, considering the way the film bandies around the term ‘savage’ as an insult to the Apaches. Maybe this was just one pun too far.)
To sum up, there are lots of good things going on here and in many respects, I was pleasantly surprised with Avenged. It’s also a hard film to call, because of the way it tries to transform itself and because of its surprises. Throughout, it has to choose between sensitivity to its subject matter and the sort of shocking creativity that will set it apart from the rest. In the end, it tends to ditch the sensitivity: maybe picking up the idea of the betrayal of the Native Americans to add onto a rape-revenge film is just one innovation too many, in the end, because a rape-revenge film is ultimately what Avenged remains.
Avenged will be available to view from March 2015.